STREB Extreme Action’s company name is truth in advertising: a group of seven superbly-trained athletes who appear to propel themselves into harm’s way, repeatedly—against walls and floors, off of trampolines and multi-story trapeze-like platforms, into and out of close encounters with a spinning industrial I-beam as it careens across stage, and much, much more. In this week’s story on the CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill, I described their edge-of-your-seat maneuvers, set to a pulsing techno soundtrack and accompanied by live and digitized video, as “a highly caffeinated remix of death-defying circus acts, gymnastics, motion-picture stunt work and modern dance.”
Choreographer, inventor, and action architect Elizabeth Streb
I spoke with choreographer, self-styled action architect—and MacArthur Foundation “Genius grant” award winner—Elizabeth Streb by phone on Feb. 6, a snowy afternoon in Philadelphia, between the company’s matinee and evening performances at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theater.
Carolina Performing Arts presents her company Friday and Saturday night in Memorial Hall. Click here for more information and tickets for the show.
Independent: How would you characterize your interest in technology in terms of the work you’re interested in doing on stage? What does technology enable you to do?
Elizabeth Streb: I would say it’s equal: My interest and passion in technology and hardware – mechanical, electronic, hydraulic, what have you – my love for those types for technology is equal to my love of movement. I see them completely similarly; they’re a congruency to me. For the idea of STREB, I started working with more quotidian objects back in the early 1980s: sticks, wood, hills, ropes and hoops. As I developed, I really started to get more metal and hardware devices involved in what I was doing.
It’s like music. As when someone, way back when, decided the human voice alone wasn’t sufficient to express everything the human might express in terms of pitch, key, melody and harmony, I felt that in a Newtonian universe, on the ground, the body’s biomechanical system, which lends itself to motion, was not, in itself, sufficient. Not to express all that can be expressed in terms of physicality.
So we invent hardware, and collaborate with a lot of different technicians, from MIT’s Media Lab and ASU Electronic Arts department to [trapeze artists and engineers] Noe and Ivan Espana, to create pieces of equipment that we can inhabit and develop new physical spatial and temporal vocabularies.
I don’t recall who defined technology as devices that extend the body’s various capacities. It sounds like one of your main interests involves extending the body’s abilities to do a number of things.
It’s sort of a funny thing. I think the initial, more basic question is, “What is the potential content of action?” Not the body doing movement, or machines working the beautiful way they work and function, or the utilitarian aspects of machines and the body, separately and together. But is there a language, exactly, that we can construct with physicality—whether it’s machine-based, electronically-based or physically-based—that will have its own grammar and syntax? That’s my goal.
I’m not just adding equipment and technology because I like it—although I really do. I do it because I think… [pauses] Okay. Let’s take just one aspect of what it means to move and talk about space. If I’m only 5 feet 7 inches tall, and I go into a theater that happens to be 30 or 40 feet tall, then I’m essentially ignoring the major hunk of that space. And for visual and physical reasons, I think that’s a disappointment to the audience and also sort of a tragedy.
When we have a wheel, an injection device, or cables and harnesses, that gets us up into that location. Otherwise, I feel that that location, that empty space, should not exist.
It’s easy enough to say that Gaspard&Dancers posted the strongest opening bid of any regional dance company in recent years in their Sunday, December 6 company premiere at Reynolds Theater. In a region where dance in general and modern dance in particular has waned over this decade, there’s been precious little competition for such a superlative. Still, if a Durham audience gave their opening work, Anemone, a somewhat subdued response, by evening’s end the crowd was on its feet in support of choreographer and dancer Gaspard Louis and his new modern dance group.
And yet, for a dance critic—and, I strongly suspect, for Mr. Louis himself—such accolades seem, in retrospect, a bit beside the point: If standing ovations in Durham are better than the proverbial sharp stick in the eye, they still don’t always indicate if dance creators have truly achieved their artistic goals.
I spoke with Ariel Dorfman about his play, Picasso’s Closet, for about 45 minutes in his office at the John Hope Franklin Institute at Duke, at midday on Oct. 13, 2009. Nasher Museum of Artwill present a staged reading of the play in conjunction with its Picasso and the Allure of Languageexhibit,Oct. 29-31, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at theDuke Box Officewebsite.
Independent: This must be a difficult script to produce.
Ariel Dorfman (Photo by D.L. Anderson)
Ariel Dorfman: This is an experimental play. Let’s say I’ve tried to do, modestly, in theater with time what Picasso does with space—which is to create many perspectives and break down the barriers of identity. Therefore it verges between the popular and the experimental.
As different characters place their viewpoints one after another, there are these interstitial planes of reality coming at each other…
Most biopics, say, tend to be rather linear. Or at least they go back and forth—childhood to adulthood to childhood to adulthood—
—the narrative of ping pong—
—and they’re very predictable in that sense.
I said to myself, “How can I possibly write a play about Picasso as if Picasso’s art had never existed?” It had to be influenced by Picasso; the greatest homage to him is really not the character on stage, but the art with which he’s being portrayed. It’s a post-Picasso play, whereas most plays about Picasso I’ve seen—most plays about artists I’ve seen—tend to act as if the artist had not influenced them at all.
Magician David Copperfield’s greatest adversary isn’t the sort of technical snafu that reportedly had him scrub one of the most amazing effects from his 5:30pm performance of An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion at DPAC yesterday afternoon:a 50’s model Lincoln convertible that we saw him, somehow, suddenly produce—not only out of thin air but set squarely in the middle of it, atop a set of pillars—despite a group of witnesses standing all around during the late show Tuesday night.
Tight like that: David Copperfield
His true nemesis isn’t the 8-foot industrial fan whose whirring blades he walked through at another point on his way to…somewhere else, let’s say.
It’s not the stinger of the live black scorpion—or the attitude it copped at one point in the proceedings, leaving us in suspense before finally obliging our host with the payoff of another illusion.
It isn’t even some wiseguy local critic in the second row, who had the foresight to bring along a magician of his own—Joshua Lozoff, whose stage show Beyond Belief had two sold-out runs at Manbites Dog Theater and whose new show, Parlor Magic, is now playing at the Siena Hotel.
No: David Copperfield’s real opponent is the age of jade.
From the printed record we surmised that magician David Copperfield wasn’t the easiest interview. The taciturn answers we’d read in most of the recent published pieces suggested a subject intent on his talking points—and, apparently, just not into most of the conversations.
But perhaps, I thought, that’s because no one poses the right questions. I mean, if everyone insisted on asking you the one thing you could never answer while still keeping your job—So, uhh, how’d you do that neat trick on stage?—you’d probably get a bit peevish yourself after a while.
So, in advance of “An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion,” his performances Tuesday and Wednesday at DPAC, I started thinking about questions that might be useful—and even answerable—by a world-class magician.
Then we were informed that Copperfield would not be available for phone or personal conversation—a barrier seemingly lowered, almost like magic, for a stringer at one daily paper, but not a columnist at another.
We could, however, e-mail him.
And then wait a week for his answers.
So we did.
Ironically, for an artist interested in presenting something intimate and grand to the public, the experience was noticeably less than both.
Below:the transcript of our e-mail exchange, and our conclusions at the end.I’d call it Exhibit A for the case against e-mail interviews, but you’ll be the judge.Nothing up our sleeves; the rest, after the jump.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
From the printed record we surmised that magician David Copperfield wasn’t the easiest interview. The taciturn answers we’d read in most of the recent published pieces suggested a subject intent on his talking points—and, apparently, just not into most of the conversations.
